The Internet, of which the World Wide Web is a part, includes a series of interlinked computer networks and servers around the world. Users of one server or network connected to the Internet may send information to, or access information on, other networks or servers connected to the Internet by the use of various computer programs which allow such access, such as Web browsers. The information is sent to, or received from, a network or server in the form of packets of data.
The World Wide Web portion of the Internet comprises a subset of interconnected Internet sites which may be characterized as including information in a format suitable for graphical display on a computer screen. Each site may include one or more separate pages. Pages, in turn, may include links to other pages within the site, or to pages in other Web sites, facilitating the user's rapid movement from one page or site to another.
A number of the sites and pages accessed through the Web may consist entirely of “static” displays of text and/or images. These displays may reside on one or more host servers or networks, and may be accessed through the Internet for storage and/or display on a remote server or network. Other sites or pages may have changing advertisements or other similar material as well as “static” displays of text and/or images.
There are a number of techniques for permitting a user, while viewing one page or site on the Web, to request and be given access to other material that relates to the material being viewed, which can be applied when the material being viewed contains static text or image displays in whole or in part.
In addition to accessing static displays of text and/or images on the Web, it also may be possible to access material on the Web which is dynamic or changing. Such material will be referred to as “temporal documents” to reflect the fact that, unlike static material, their content as made available to or perceived by a user may change with the passage of time. Examples of such temporal documents are multimedia material such as video and audio programming, but there are other types of temporal documents as well. For example, the text of news bulletins, stock quotations such as would be seen on a “ticker tape”, or sports scores may be made available; material such as this by its nature also may be changing as it is viewed, either because the underlying information is changing, or because the information is “scrolled” across the user's monitor, thus appearing as constantly changing with time. Other types of dynamic or changing material will also be apparent to one of ordinary skill in the art.
Temporal documents may have been previously created and stored on a server for later access (such as a movie, or a recording of a previously-occurring sports event) or a temporal document may reflect an event that is occurring “live” at the time the temporal document is transmitted over the Internet (such as a live news broadcast or sports event, or a stock ticker displaying real-time stock transaction information).
Whether the temporal document is previously-created or is being accessed live, it is useful to have a technique to facilitate a user obtaining material that relates to a portion of the temporal document he is viewing or listening to. Because the material is changing, however, some of the techniques that may be used to provide access to material that is related to a static page being viewed, may not be readily applicable to temporal documents.
Some previous methods of providing additional material related to changing content such as video programming have relied upon the prior manual choice of other Web documents, such as pages or sites, to be associated with particular portions of the video content. Then, when a particular portion of the video programming is reached, the related Web page or document may automatically be presented to the user, or the user may be informed of the availability of a link to the related material, and offered the choice of accessing it. Alternatively, no information about related material may be presented until or unless a user indicates interest during a particular segment of the video material (as by “clicking” with a mouse, or pressing a button); upon an expression of interest, the particular other Web page previously chosen as related to this portion of the video material may be presented to the user.
This method of associating related material to a temporal document has drawbacks, however. Because it requires the preselection of the associated material, it cannot be utilized with live material, or with material that has not been previously analyzed for the purpose. It also may be costly, in that it may require intensive manual manipulation of the multimedia material to choose other Web pages to associate with each portion of the video or audio material, and to carry out the association. It also may be rigid, in that once the selection is made it may remain unchanged regardless of whether other more appropriate related material becomes available. It may be both expensive and time-consuming to make changes once links have been established. Additionally, this method may offer a very limited choice to the user in that it may not be practical to offer a large number of links at each portion of the video or audio material.
Thus, there is a need for a method or device for permitting a user to obtain access to other material that is related to a portion of a temporal document (such as a video or audio program) being accessed on the Web, where the selection of the related material offered to the user is not made in advance, but is done automatically at the time the user expresses an interest in obtaining such material. Such a method or device makes “hypervideo” a practical concept.
One aspect of this need is a need for determining the portion of the temporal document about which the user would like to obtain additional information. In the case of a “static” display of material as might be presented to the user on a computer monitor, it may be possible to have the user indicate the material of interest by using a mouse or other similar selection device to maneuver a cursor on the monitor until it is superimposed on the portion of the display of interest, and then to “click” on the material of interest. In the case of a changing display, such as video, that may not be practical. For example, because it may take a certain amount of time for the user to decide that he is interested in obtaining additional material, and a certain amount of time to maneuver the mouse or other signaling device to indicate interest, the expression of interest may be delayed by a certain amount from the actual material in which the user is interested.
Another aspect of this need is a need for determining what other material is related to the material in which the user has expressed an interest. In the case of a static display which includes a display of text, it may be possible to have the user indicate the specific material in which he is interested (as by using a mouse to maneuver a cursor to the word or term displayed on the screen), and then to use that specific text as the basis of a search query using a conventional Web search engine. But in the case of video material, that may not be possible.